Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday June 13, 2010 @05:40PM
from the let-me-know-what-you-find dept.

JeremyDuffy writes "I have a photo project of over 7,000 photos. I want to tag them based on location, time of day, who's in them, etc. Doing this by hand one at a time through the Windows 7 interface in Explorer is practically madness. There has to be a better way. Is there a photo manager that can easily group and manage file tags? And most importantly, something that stores the tag and other data (description etc.) in the file, not just a database? I don't care if the thing has a database, but the data must be in the file so when I upload the files to the Internet, the tags are in place."

He doesn't want a GPL Linux version because if he uses it, his photos become derivative works and therefore he loses all ownership of his photos, his camera, his computer, and everything that he photographed becomes GPL'd which means, if the guy photographed his girlfriend, all of the FOSS community has to sleep with her.

I can do better than that! I'd like to present the transformers analogy - it's like a car analogy, but it changes into a robot analogy!

Let's say the GPL and MPEG LA are both kind of like jeeps - both are utilitarian enough to help you accomplish quite a lot, but they can be rather unwieldy, too. We could say that GPL is more like the old army jeep and its relatives - it gives you access to a lot of things but it comes with its own hindrances. But you have the opportunity to pick through what's out there,

If you have enough "subscribers" if you do not charge per download (over 100,000) you MUST PAY A LICENSE FEE. And these fees are much steeper than Over-The-Air video, because the Internet is somehow special.

If you make video LONGER THAN 12 MINUTES and distribute it you must pay 2% royalties *or* 2 cents per movie, whichever is greater. If your home movie becomes popular and is more than 12 minutes and you have not paid your two cents per download (even if you do not charge for it!) and they take notice of it, you will soon see the sky blacken with lawyers.

Beyond participation fees for indirect revenue (revenue not directly from the user), MPEG LA also sets out amounts for title-by-title (rental or per-view). For videos less than 12 minutes long, there is no royalty; but for videos beyond 12 minutes in length, the amounts are decided at 2% of the retail price paid to the licensee or 2 cents per title. The retail price is specifically noted as a "first arms length" transaction, specifically between the end user and the seller of on-demand, pay-per-view, and electronic downloads to end users.

If your video is longer than 12 minutes, MPEG-LA has its hooks in your content whether you like it or not. Even if it's a home movie of your kids that is 13 minutes long, you owe MPEG-LA money if you "broadcast" it over the Internet. Even if you give it away, the minimum charge is 2 cents per download as described above.

Doesn't matter. The file was encoded using their codecs when it was initially captured by your video camera. Unless you own one of the 3 models that use motion JPEG to capture, the licensing terms in the software encoder used by your hardware dictate that you pay them this royalty regardless of the codec you use to distribute.

I saw something a while back that suggested even that is insufficient, if they can demonstrate your camera filmed the video using an MPEG-LA covered technology. I don't think they've ever pursued such a case, but when you purchase a camera that records with MPEG-LA covered technology, your patent license sets limits on the content you record with it, regardless of what format it ends up in.

Personally, I'm hoping for some cameras that record WebM in the near future (of course, this hope hinges on the hope th

where an end user pays directly for video services on a title-by-title basis...royalties for video greater than 12 minutes (there is no royalty for a title 12 minutes or less) are..the lower of 2% of the price paid to theLicensee (on first arms length sale of the video) or $0.02 per title

Subscription services:

Where an end user pays directly for video services on a subscription-basis (not ordered or limited title-by-title), the applicable royalties...payable by the service or content provider are...100,000 or fewer subscribers during the year = no royalty; greater than 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers during the year = $25,000; greater than 250,000 to 500,000 subscribers during the year = $50,000; greater than 500,000 to 1,000,000 subscribers during the year = $75,000; greater than 1,000,000 subscribers during the year =$100,000.

Sponsorship

Where remuneration is from other sources, in the case of free television [over-the-air, satellite and/or cable transmission]...which is not paid for by an End User), the licensee [the broadcaster] may pay...according to one of two royalty options: (i) a one-time payment of $2,500 per AVC transmission encoder...or (ii) annual fee per Broadcast Market starting at $2,500 per calendar year per Broadcast Markets of at least 100,000 but no more than 499,999 television households

In the case of Internet broadcast (AVC video that is delivered via the Worldwide Internet to an end user for which the end user does not pay..for the right to receive or view, i.e., neither title-by-title nor subscription), there will be no royalty during the first term of the License (ending December 31, 2010) and following term (ending December 31, 2015), after which the royalty shall be no more than the economic equivalent of royalties payable during the same time for free television.

The enterprise cap

In the case of the...sublicenses for video content or service providers, the maximum annual royalty ("cap") for an enterprise (commonly controlled legal entities) is...$5 million per year in 2010.

Renewable five-year license

License will be renewable for five-year periods...on reasonable terms and conditions which may take into account prevailing market conditions, changes in technological environment and available commercial products at the time, but for the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specificlicensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal

To sum up:

If you are worth less than $2500 to MPEG LA they don't want to hear from you.

[Retail sale of 125,000 Trek Wars disks @ 2 cents a disk]

Under the existing formula, the licensing cost to Apple, Disney, Microsoft or Google for hosting freely distributed H.264 video on the Internet would be capped at $5 million a year.

A self-hosted file, if it becomes popular, even if it's free, will cost you.02 per download.

There are many people on YouTube with more than 1,000,000 viewers per title, so this is not some figure I pulled out of my ass. Since YouTube absorbs these costs because they host, it doesn't matter to the people who upload videos like KeyboardCat. However, you are completely unprotected if you self-host. Should you be creative enough that something go viral, you are on the

Well, thankfully some (quite a lot actually) of us live in "communist" countries, where such blatant attempts at blackmail will be laughed out of court.

Some of us even live in countries, where the lawyer representing the MPEG-LA is likely to have his or her knuckles used as target practice for the judge's gavel.

See - not only did we not sign any contract with the MPEG-LA, nor do software patents apply, but if we've bought a product in good faith, any patent breach that might apply is going to fall on the head of the manufacturer, i.e. the company that made the camera - not us. And since any camera that can record video is designed to... what's the term... record video, we will always be in good faith, even if we record more than 12 minutes and turn it into a movie.

But hey - if that means we can't publish or visit the US without getting sued in the US - well, that's their loss, not ours.

It's really a fascinating indicator of the situation Microsoft is in that they are so scared to include or promote basic photo gallery features in Win7 that people like this are completely unaware it exists.

For my money I like it much better than Picasa for the simple reason that it treats your photos *as files* rather than as a *database*. I got completely fed up with Picasa *pretending* it had modified my files when it had really only made changes in it's own database. Then you give photos to someone else and you find Picasa never really applied any of your changes. Or worse, you ditch Picasa and find out that years of long hard work is gone because Picasa was privately storing all that information (even things like rotations, cropping, etc.). (Yes, I know it has some option somewhere to turn this off. I resent the fact they make it the default).

I *like* the fact that the changes aren't saved in the file immediately - it gives me infinite undo, even months later. And if I click the save icon on a folder, it *does* save the changes in the files, and makes backups, too. Best of both worlds, I think.

Parent is right that Picasa has inconsistent and proprietary behavior. It uses INI files in each folder that store most of the developing and album information in plaintext. So you can tweak and recover that to a certain degree. But it has a separate database for caption data. If you make a caption change and commit changes to disk, the captions are not updated in the JPG or the INI. (AFAIK)

Picasa doesn't store its tagging info locally in each directory; this information is put in the "Program Files"

I'm often surprised by how few people understand how Picasa really works, as this is not the case.

Any potentially 'destructive' changes to a photo are stored in a picasa.ini file in each folder. These changes include rotations, cropping, sharpen, etc. When you view a photo in picasa, it displays with all these changes applied. You can undo a change at any time. Changes are NOT applied to the file on disk until you press 'save'.To be clear, there is no magic, hidden, or proprietary database; it's just a simple per-directory picasa.ini file. As for backups, if you've backed up the directory including the picasa.ini file, then any non-saved changes will be backed up.

Non-destructive changes, such as captions or tags, are applied immediately to the photo. Again, to be clear, these are applied directly to the photo and can be read by any other photo tool that can read exif data.

The one exception to this is the recently introduced face tagging feature. Unfortunately, Google really messed up with their implementation of this feature. Facial tags are stored in a combination of the picasa.ini file & a central database. I've found the implementation to be quite poor, and I would not recommend using this feature.

I think it's exellent that the app does not alter the *original files* as the default setting.

How many people do you really think want transformations like rotations only applied as metadata in some unknown database someplace? When my mother clicks "rotate left" she wants the photo rotated, not some bit twiddled in Picasa's database record for that image. If she uses Windows' interface to print the photo or emails it to a friend, it is the rotated image she cares about.

Not only that, but if you are backing up your photos to an external source like a good user, imagine the frustration when years of transformations, edits, tags, etc are all lost when you recover from a failed hard drive using your backup. You did everything right, but because you didn't include some hidden little.dat file buried in your profile as part of the backup you lost hundreds of hours of work.

Modifications to the files should be applied to the files. Metadata should be stored in the files. To do either otherwise is asking for problems.

I actually agree with both methods. I don't want my files destructively altered by my photo cataloging software. I also don't want to lose my hours of work.

Having used Picasa extensively since it was purchased by Google, I have suffered the lost hard drive issue - losing all of my folders that had taken years to put together - with 50k+ photos, that's no joke. It was a royal pain in the ass. The picasa backup tool brought back all of the photos, and something of a database of folders and faces, but hopelessly corrupted so that I had thousands of "faces" in the wrong file or wrong location on the file, all labeled "unknown".

I want to have my cake and eat it too... a file format that holds all of the meta data, is completely portable, even across platforms and applications, never makes destructive changes to the original data and yet displays the rotated, cropped and edited photo, complete with faces and names. Oh, and let's keep the information about people's identities secure, unless I chose to release it, but make sure that it can tie out to any other face management system. Crap, I think I just specified my way out of any real product.

I like Lightroom's approach -- a mix of database, sidecar files, and ability to write the metadata back into the files if I want to. Doesn't fit your casual user paradigm, but addresses your problems. Also, any of the modern photo workflow tools deal with the concept of a digital negative and allow you to do edits, changes etc. non-destructively, where all the actual image edits are stored in a sidecar or a copy of the original.

The problem is, that's the opposite of the default of how virtually every other piece of photo editing/management software out there works. To both a) not act in a standard manner *and* b) to fail to notify the user that you not acting in the standard manner is very bad behavior. (And one of the reasons I dropped Picasa.)

There's an "export version" or similarly named option on almost all modern photo managers that will create a new copy of the selected photo(s) with all of the changes embedded in the new file. It sounds like Mr. Duffy is just making changes in his photo manager, and then trying to upload the original file rather than using the "export version" option. The database system used by most photo managers is to help you preserve Masters of your ph

Picasa would be a wonderful solution for pictures that are stored on only one computer, which is is running either Windows or Mac OS X. I've tried to setup Picasa 3.6, through wine, on Linux. The interface is wonderful, but there are two shortcomings that are dealbreakers, in my mind:

1. Any tagging you've done cannot be synced the to other computers. Picasa doesn't store its tagging info locally in each directory; this information is put in the "Program Files". You can, presumably, backup your collectio

And to further answer the question, the "official" Linux version from the Google Linux repositories is behind the Windows and OS X versions. If I am not mistaken, it is WAY behind, as in I think the Linux version is 2.x and Windows and OS X have 3.x.

Personally, I don't care a whole lot because the version I have on my Ubuntu boxes does everything I need it to do, and the OS X version I use is great too. (I used to love iPhoto, but once they went to the "Events" paradigm and blew away my years of sorting p

Its odd, last time I tried to use wine I couldn't get anything to run, but I had Picasa and it ran fine. Perhaps when I installed wine after installing Picasa I screwed something up. Its kinda misleading to say they have a Linux version that requires wine to run. Mea Culpa

Forget Picasa, I have a Windows machine, and I don't even use it. I do everything on PicasaWeb. PicasaWeb also works quite well for batch tagging work. Plus, I have filters on my gmail that directly email pictures from other relatives for immediate storage into PicasaWeb.

OS X comes with a graphical scripting tool called Automator. You can set up a batch file rename script with it that will rename every photo in a folder of your choice with the date and time added to the file name, plus a sequence number, and any other text if you desire. I used it to rename over 8000 photos originally named img_xxxx in 2 or 3 minutes.

So just copy them onto a Mac, run the Automator script on them, and copy them back.

Rather than your wry wit, you could have given some alternatives. Like RenBatch (free ware). Or I could spend the next 200 lines explaining how you can already do this with Batch files and proper command line fu, but somehow I doubt that would be helpful for most of the readers. The few that would understand, already know how.

No, but easy GUI-based script editing that's included in the OS by default may well be unique to Mac OS (if not, please correct me). Automator is far easier to use than DOS batch files, shell scripts, Windows Scripting/VBS, or text-mode AppleScript because it can record what you do as you do it and then let you edit the capture using graphical "actions" instead of code.

I just use Gnome's filesystem manager called nautilus, it supports tagging and commenting filesystem files. Filenames and tags are then indexed by "tracker" which has a multitude of client interfaces and applets for searching the indexed data. I always find my fotos easily by this way.

The fotos are stored in a organized collection which the only backends are the regular filesystem and gvfs. On my collection's toplevel directory I put every event prefixed by its date:20100105_Birthday.of.xxxx20100120_Going.t

What you really need to do is this. Buy a couple plaid shirts, some black socks and some Birks but make sure you pay a lot for them. Get some capri pants at the GAP (make sure you pay full price). Next, get some patchouli scented shave lotion and a Mac(don't worry...you will pay full price for this and we have begun.
Go home set up your make and get changed, you are now a Mac owner!
You will find that tagging, sorting,arranging via meta data is easy. Its living that has become hard. Now you must tag everything using iambic pantameter and haiku. Instead of tagging things buy the current dating system use what day of the BP disaster it is. If your wife asks you what you are doing, try to be condescending... no one understands you anymore but steve.
While tagging your photos try to use the words postmodern and neo a lot. it will begin to feel natural soon...
Good luck!
A new mac user|
so fragile and delicate|
like leaves on a breeze

Install Windows Live PhotoGallery from the Windows Live Essentials. This is exactly what it is designed for and can do smart tagging.

Even though Win7 doesn't install the 'Essentials' applications, they really are 'Essential' to get the most out of Windows7. There is also a download link for them in the Start Menu, and you can pick and choose what you want easily.

Doing all your tagging via Explorer is functional, but not the optimal way of dealing with Photos in Windows 7. In Photogallery you just drag and drop to tag photos or use the face identification system.

(The June beta of the next generation of Live Essentials and PhotoGallery should be along soon as well with several new tricks that pulls in several of the MS Photo R&D work.)

*Don't waste your time with 'Album' or other tagging software that shoves your photos into their file structure, which is a LOT of them.

I was recently wanting to do something similar. I decided on using the open source Digikam software (which may not be an option for you under Windows), because it has powerful photo management functionality, but also because it stores tags and more all as XMP data directly within my JPEG file.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform

There is work being done to do face recognition to tag people in photos, one of the things that is taking most of the time for me.

My application was a custom photo-blog, with some neat tag-based features (like "show me the pictures taken at this person's house that have this oher person it them").

So, I tag them in digikam, do cropping and comments, and then save the image. I then wrote some Python programs to check this data for consistency, and to load the data into a database for the web server. The web server also has the ability to edit tags and comments, so I then have code to, once reviewed, write these changes out to the XMP meta-data.

But, the photos themselves are the authoritative source for this information. If I lost the database, no problem. The photos are the authoritative source for all that information.

Oh, I forgot to mention that one of the tools in the upload chain is to get rid of albums and instead encode it in the file with a tag called something like "Blog/Group/$UUID_STRING". It also saves off the "album thumbnail" in a similar way ("Blog/Group/IsAlbumThumbnail").

It's worked extremely well.

I use the command-line "exiv2" program to export and import the XMP data as XML, then I process it (the parts mentioned above) as XML.

Yes it costs money, but it does a ton of things. It keeps a database for your tags/whatever but you can have it apply any and all info it knows about your pictures to the EXIF/IPTC fields. There's a ton of scriptability and you can export the DB to tons of formats (and define your own format). Hey just looked at the website and it supports XMP as well (another metadata in the file thing).

I recently read on one of my photography forums that if you convert your raw files to Adobe's DNG (digital negative) format that subsequent tagging and edits will end up in Lightroom's database and NOT in the image file. If, on the other hand, you stay with the original raw file Lightroom will write the changes out to an XMP (side-car) file that is at least under your control and not dependent on Lightroom's database.

http://jbrout.python-hosting.com/wiki [python-hosting.com]
Cross platform. Claims to have been tested on GNU/Linux and Windows XP/2K.
Been meaning to try it as my own photo collection is starting to get a little unwieldy, but haven't done so yet.

Lightroom is likely more than you need, but Lightroom does this.I convert my various (nef, cr2) raw files to DNG upon importation to my library, and save metadata to the files themselves, not XML sidecar files.

While Adobe Lightroom will want work with its own database, by always syncing metadata to file you will have a 100% portable set of images.

On your own system you could simply take advantage of Long File Names to associate a modest amount of data with an image. If you really want the data inside the file, though, then almost any image-manipulation tool will let you do that. Take "good old Microsoft Paint" for example. You can take an image that is, say, 300x400 pixels and paste it into a completely blank image where you have specified a size of 300x500 pixels. Your original image now occupies the upper part of this new image, and you have 3

I second that reocmmendation -- I have not found a better tool than lightroom. You'll have to remember to either select the auto-write option or remember to manually sync, and quite oddly it won't let you add geotags -- it'll read them and even gives you nifty Google maps links, but it won't let you edit them; everything else you can, and the sorting and tagging features are superb. Of course it's also a brilliant editor, and not too cheap, but it's one software package I, as an avid amateur photographer, felt was worth every penny.

I can vouch for the robustness of DNG files. I lost a HDD, recovered most of the files, dumped them back into Lightroom and everything was retained, even my ratings and edit history. DNG is an awesome format.

Besides being one of the best photo managers I have worked with, you can directly edit the metadata for each file. The only downside is that it usually comes bundled with other Adobe software, which can be costly.